Do Fish Drink Water?

The title of this book hooked me, but you won’t get the answer from me. Do Fish Drink Water is a collection of answers and trivia for a myriad of questions that you may have pondered, but did not care enough to seek the answers. AuthorBill McLain took the time. Besides answering such questions as “What is the origin of the neckties that men wear?” and Why do I get a headache when I eat ice cream too fast?” McLain also tackles some pretty big questions like “What caused the Great Depression of 1929?”

The format of the book is a question followed by a short section (a few paragraphs – though the Great Depression got a whole page) answering the question followed by some “factoids” and trivia loosely based on the question. Some of the pondered questions fit well into the short answer format and McLain provides some detail and lists Internet links at the end of each chapter for more research. I don’t think that the knowledge imparted will help you with much of anything except for a game of Trivial Pursuit, but the short essay format makes for good reading in places where you only want to read a few pages at a time.

Perhaps the most compelling pages were answers to the age old question of “How many licks does it take to reach the center of a Tootsie Pop?” The owl on their commercial insists that it takes three, but college students studied the problem and determined that the answer was 142.

I also found out that there are 21 colors of M&Ms candy and that green M&Ms are considered an aphrodisiac, orange ones make the breasts bigger, and brown ones are considered bad luck at least by the band Van Halen who banned the color for concerts. I wonder why bags of green and orange ones are not marketed to men for Valentine’s Day.